![]() With primitive navigational tools and no bombsights, the raiders drizzled explosives without any pretense of hitting military or industrial targets. To counter the defensive cordon, the Gothas flew night missions. ![]() The British hastily summoned fighter units to gird the cities. The dead and wounded totaled 600, and the raid wrought consternation among the public and the government. The bomber had proven itself as a weapon against a military target.Ī few weeks later, 14 Gothas attacked London in the first fixed-wing assault upon civilians and their institutions. This raid killed 300 people, including 115 soldiers. Two years later Germany’s Gotha bomber, a machine capable of a round trip from Belgian bases, struck at Folkestone, a port through which British soldiers embarked for the front. The first strategic bombing raid in 1915 deployed not airplanes but German Zeppelins, rigid airships that dumped ordnance on the east coast of Great Britain. Behind the strategy that governed the American air war in Europe during World War II lay events and ideas that dated back to World War I and the 1920s.
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